This has to be the most non-thought out addition to the game. Almost every single game I’m in recently has one troll or thrower (which, apparently, I can’t name in the forums because “oh no, we might lose a paying consumer if too many people call out this person and make them feel uncomfortable”), and Blizzard’s “solution” (to make it appear like they care more about players than profit) is to let us block TWO players and TWO players only (which, by the way… where do you even find the names of those two after you add them on console?)
I just don’t understand the logic of not being able to avoid all the trolls and game throwers we’re forced to play with and that Blizzard avoids reprimanding in any meaningful way.
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And maybe if people get avoided by 500+ people or a more suitable number, they’d be queued with eachother or something. Sounds like heaven to me!
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The concern is that if too many people avoid each other, it will create holes in the matchmaking that forces the matchmaker to create more imbalanced games. The matchmaker is a machine, after all, it can only work with what it’s given, and if everyone is avoiding each other as teammates, there’s naturally going to be some times where it has to strain itself to find an even match – longer queue times, or more uneven match-ups.
That said, Blizzard has already said that they’re open to making more slots for avoiding players so long as the matchmaker can handle it. They want to start small so they can keep a close eye on it, rather than promising their millions of players, “Hey, you can avoid as many people as you want to make your game better!” and later have to backtrack and effectively say, “Sorry, you can’t make your games better anymore,” all because of some algorithms.
Give it some time and remember that you can un-avoid players to avoid new ones. Realistically, once you avoid one person as a teammate for a couple hours, you’re pretty unlikely to bump into them anyway.
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If Blizzard is concerned that we could possibly block too many players, then yes… there is CLEARLY reason to be worried about the number of trolls/throwers. But no… with 40 million players, the number of players we could possibly block is not a concern.
Yeah, heaven forbid any of us try to get Blizzard’s attention. Concerns =/= profit. I’m not a newbie to getting blocked by Blizzard. They’ve already blocked me on Twitter for pointing out that they should do something about a user with “nahzi” in their name.
I think you underestimate how people would exploit an unlimited avoid feature, and how little it would need to be exploited in order to create matchamking mix ups. You’re only imagining the avoid teammate feature as being used to avoid trolls and throwers, but if people had unlimited avoids, they would avoid any player for any reason. So if I decide that I only want “good” players on my team, only the best players, well, I could do that, and I would end up with this huuuuge avoid as teammate list simply because I want to avoid anyone I consider to be “bad.” This is an exploit; bad teammates are going to happen, teammates that just underperform or are the weakest link in your team, and the avoid feature is meant to be used to avoid toxic players, not weak ones.
Furthermore, consider how many people at any given moment can even be queued with an individual player. There’s millions of players, but only a fraction of them are active around the world at once; now consider your region, and that’s another fraction; consider latency, that’s another fraction; consider your MMR, that’s another fraction; consider how many of these remaining players are already in a game and can’t queue, another fraction; and now consider your group size and your group’s cumulative list of avoided players. Do you see how quickly the list of potential players to make a match out of dwindles down? When you avoid even two players, as far as that session goes, you’ve already made a big impact on how the matchmaker is free to make matches.
This is why it’s limited. The potential exploits, plus the burden it causes the matchmaker, only allow for so many players to be avoided at one time. All we can do is continue to see the success of the avoid feature, and allow Blizzard to roll out more avoid slots that can be used at any given time.